sAuth: a hierarchical implicit authentication mechanism for service robots

Abstract

AbstractWith advances in networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things, humanoid robots are rising in many areas, including elderly care, companion, education, and services in public sectors. Given their sensing and communication functionality, information leakage and unauthorized access will be of big concern. Very often, authentication techniques for service robots, especially those related to behavioral identification, have been developed, in which behavior models are created using raw data from sensors. However, behavioral-based authentication and re-authentication is still an open area for research, including cold start problems, accuracy, and uncertainty. This paper proposes a hierarchical implicit authentication system by joint built-in sensors and trust evaluation, coined sAuth, which exploits sensor data-based sliding window trust model to identify the service robot and its expected users. In order to mitigate the fluctuations of identification results in the real world environment, the trust evaluation is computed via combining the weighted intermediate identification probability of various small sliding windows. The performance of sAuth is evaluated under different scenarios where we show that (i) approximately 5–7% higher accuracy and 2–18% lower equal error rate can be achieved by our method compared to other works; and (ii) the hierarchical scheme with joint sensors and trust sliding windows improves the authentication accuracy significantly by comparing it with only sensor-based authentication.